In comparison to a typical computer monitor, a handheld device's display screen is more restricted in the amount of information that can be displayed. As such, for a handheld device, efficient use of display area is a non-trivial and pressing issue. Specifically, a general file/folder structure usually implemented for display on a typical computer monitor, is not well suited for display on a handheld device. Thus, for a handheld device to display information with a file/folder structure, a tab-based GUI can facilitate the display of information on a handheld device. In this capacity, the tab-based GUI organizes different files/folders as categories for presentation on the small display screen of the handheld device. These categories are graphically represented as tabs without introducing a large “footprint” on the small display screen.
In particular, users need to be able to switch categories presented on the display screen of a handheld device quickly and easily. Thus, using tabs at the top of the screen to navigate between categories facilitates this end. However, the tab-based GUI can still be somewhat inconvenient if there are more tabs than will fit on the screen at once. What is unresolved is: how to find tabs that do not fit on the display screen.
Prior art approaches add additional GUI elements (such as scroll arrows) to scroll the tabs left and right in order to view all of the tabs. Alternatively, multiple rows of tabs can be displayed. Unfortunately, these prior art solutions leave too large a footprint on the display screen, obscuring other information from being displayed or are inconvenient to use. Thus, these prior art approaches do not provide an acceptable solution for the small screens of handheld devices.
Specifically, these prior art approaches require additional GUI elements, which can be problematic when using small screens. Also, these elements are often small, and therefore harder to activate (by stylus or mouse). Moreover, some implementations always scroll an entire screen width at once. On these systems, if only one more tab exists than will fit on the screen, then a whole screen with the one extra tab will be displayed when the screen is scrolled. Only one tab is on-screen while the remaining majority of tabs are not on-screen. As such, screen area is not efficiently utilized.